Don't Let Me
by nine miles to go
Summary: An away mission ends in tragedy for Chekov.


Disclaimer: I don't own Star Trek. Curses afoul.

Anywho, this is a response to a prompt from the kink meme on livejournal, but I felt like posting it here, too, because the world can really never have enough Chekov angst. Here goes?

* * *

"Uhura to Enterprise, do you copy?"

Despite her best efforts, Uhura had not been able to communicate to the natives of the planet that they meant no harm, and their language was so complex and involved that even the universal translator was completely useless. Then she'd made the mistake of trying to gesture their intentions, which set the species into what appeared to be a fit of rage. She and Chekov had bolted the instant they heard weapon fire.

Scotty's voice crackled over the communicator. "I copy, but I'm havin' trouble locking to your signal, the planet's core is magnetic—"

"Hurry," Uhura snapped, flicking her head up to see the pale Chekov's eyes scanning the abandoned area anxiously.

"Sit tight," said Scotty, "I've almost got you."

Uhura took a deep breath to calm her nerves and regarded the young ensign beside her. She raised a hand to clap on his shoulder, but the first shot blasted through the darkness before she could, and they both jumped in terror. They'd clearly been spotted, and from the sound of it there were more than a few creatures pursuing them.

"Get down," Uhura cried, tugging Chekov down with her. Another violent shot penetrated their ears and she heard Chekov cry out.

"Chekov, are you—"

"I'm fine, I'm okay," he said hastily, crouching beside her. They looked each other in the eye for a moment, a moment that would haunt her forever—she would always remember that the last she saw of Chekov was his dark eyes widening in fear, and the last she heard of him was him screaming her name before she slipped into unconsciousness.

* * *

Even as he battered his fingers against the screen and focused all his energies on locking their signals, Scotty could hear the kid's screams. He knew Chekov well enough to know that his Russian pride would never allow him to break down unless it meant something more awful than Scotty wanted to imagine.

"Have medical on stand-by," Kirk ordered from where he stood, rigid behind the console. "Get them outta there, Scotty . . ."

Another scream. Scotty thought he might be sick, but then by some miracle he'd locked on their signals. "Go!" Kirk yelled unnecessarily, and Scotty beamed them out, a pit of dread sinking in his stomach.

He held his breath as they materialized. At first all he perceived was a red mass—then, to his horror and revulsion, he realized it was the kid's shirt, riddled with holes. He was crouched around Uhura, shielding her unconscious form. Violent tremors ran up his body and he moaned.

Scotty reached them first. Gently he lifted Chekov from Uhura, trying to gage the situation, trying not to throw up. The kid was beyond coherency—his eyes were wide and unseeing, and Scotty knew enough to recognize that he was going into shock, and that judging by the puddle around the transporter he'd lost far too much blood—

"Where the fuck is medical?" Kirk demanded loudly. His voice lowered, and Scotty realized he was beside him now. "Oh, shit. Oh, God, Chekov—"

"Don't scare the lad," Scotty croaked. "He'll be okay—"

"Get the fuck out of the way!"

As soon as Chekov's limp form was carted off Scotty closed his eyes and prayed for the first time in his life.

* * *

The fact that the kid was even alive right now defied anything Bones had ever learned in medicine, but he was not about to take it for granted. He barked orders in all directions as the gurney traveled through the turbolift, simultaneously assessing Chekov's condition and instructing medical bay what to expect. He tried to remain detached, single-minded, professional—but Chekov gasped and his pain was palpable, searing like a burn across his face. Bones made the mistake of making eye contact.

Chekov looked up at him searchingly for a moment, and then he cried out, trying to sit up. Bones pushed him back down just as the turbolift doors opened and they wheeled him out at breakneck speed.

The kid's eyes were filled with tears and he bit his lip, and his determination not to cry out a second time almost broke Bones's heart. "I'm going to die," the boy said breathlessly.

"Don't say that," Bones said tersely.

They arrived at medical and Bones set to work immediately—he would not lose this kid, he could fix this. He could fix this.

"How is he?"

"Shut up, Jim."

For once Kirk obeyed, and to Bones's distress Chekov was still bleeding profusely and no amount of blood pumped back into his system was going to help. The wounds weren't closing up, the weaponry had literally burned through his internal organs. Bones glanced up only for an instant to find his tricorder and saw that Chekov's eyes were wet with tears.

"Don't let me die," he begged.

Bones ignored him. He wasn't going to die, he couldn't, but fuck, the tricorder was offering no answers on the nature of the wounds, he was just going to have to patch him up the best he could despite the fact that this was way more than he'd ever been prepared to handle.

The beeping of the damned machine behind them quickened all at once, and Chekov gasped, pleading in a painful wheeze, "Don't let me die, don't let me die . . ."

"Damn it, kid, you're not going to die!" Bones yelled, as if his statement could somehow make it true.

Chekov's eyes drooped and his head lolled to the side. "No, don't do this to me," Bones said under his breath. "Chapel, we've gotta revive him—"

The machine flat lined, but Bones was having none of it. Reverting to old-fashioned paddles he tried over and over to get the kid back, tried until his muscles were exhausted and his eyes were full of tears, tried until Chekov's lips were blue and his skin too pale to ever hold blood again.

When he stepped back, heaving for air, Kirk started in alarm. "Bones—"

"He's dead, Jim," Bones rasped, his voice hitching.

"Oh, God," Kirk breathed. "Shit . . ."

As Bones wrenched his eyes away from the kid's corpse, Chekov echoed in his ears—Don't let me die, don't let me die, don't let me die . . .

Bones let him down.

* * *

Spock had not known anything was amiss with the away mission until Sulu stumbled onto the bridge, his eyes raw with emotion.

"Lieutenant—" Spock began.

"It's Chekov. He's dead."

Once when Spock was a boy he had slipped from a ledge and landed flat on his stomach. Suddenly Spock felt as though he had been thrown to that same unyielding ground again, paralyzed and disbelieving. For a full seven seconds he stared soundlessly at the ensign's console, unable to consider the idea of another navigator replacing the eager young Chekov.

The next words that escaped Spock were quite illogical. "Are you certain?"

Sulu nodded, apparently too overcome with emotion to provide any other answer.

"And Uhura?" Spock asked, blinking unnecessarily to dissolve the image of Chekov's empty station from his consciousness.

"She's fine," Sulu managed. "In sickbay." Spock saw a tear run down the pilot's face and bowed out of the bridge, handing the conn to the engineer on the gamma shift. He was certain that Sulu did not desire an audience.

The moment the turbolift doors slid shut, Spock closed his eyes and made an effort to control the swell of grief blossoming in his ribcage. It felt as though the air around him were pressurized. He took a calculated breath, composing himself just as the doors opened to sickbay.

The whole deck was silent and heavy. Every person Spock passed averted their eyes to the floor, and Spock numbly processed the sight of fresh blood trailing the tiles.

He found Uhura sobbing openly on a biobed behind a closed curtain, her head bandaged but otherwise unharmed. "Nyota," Spock said softly, sitting beside her.

Hearing his voice, she pitched forward even further, her distress worsening. For a long time she didn't speak, only took quaking and spluttering gasps of anguish, leaning against him, pushing her weight on him as if to determine that he was really there beside her. Her hands searched blindly for his and he took them, returning her grasp.

When her sobs had finally quieted, she moaned, "I killed him."

"Nyota, I am certain that Ensign Chekov's death is by no means your—"

She shuddered, interrupting him. "You don't understand. He died protecting me. Stupid kid—" She broke off, her eyes welling with thick tears, her throat clogged with emotion. "I screwed up. If we'd just read the briefings more carefully—if I'd known Chekov would—"

"The circumstances were beyond your control," Spock said, hoping to offer some form of comfort.

But she shook her head emphatically. "He took shots that were meant for me, Spock. It's my fault." Her eyes were distant, unable to look at Spock, and she said listlessly, "We should have both been killed, but I'm alive . . . and Chekov is dead because of it."

* * *

He was only seventeen fucking years old.

Kirk buried his head in his hands and suppressed the urge to drive his fist into a wall. He was supposed to be captain now, and he was supposed to handle this situation as such—he owed it to Chekov's poor mother.

As he connected the sub-space transmission he unwillingly recalled Chekov's bright face as he prattled on excitedly about his home in Russia, of the cold winter air in his lungs when he went running, of food that would simply never compare to the imitations they were fed on the ship, of his five sisters who shared a passion for string instruments. Always cheerful, always talkative, always beaming—Chekov had succeeded in worming his way into the hearts of every crew member within his first month on duty.

Kirk also remembered the one night they'd gotten more than a few shots of replicated vodka in the kid's system. They'd decided to never pull that stunt again, because as it turned out the kid made a pretty sad drunk. His father had left him at a young age, he missed his mother and sisters, and until his appointment to the USS Enterprise he'd never had much in the way of friends.

It had only been five hours since Chekov's death, and it seemed like he found bits of piece of Chekov in every corner. He almost expected the kid to come barreling down the hallways, or burying his nose into a data PADD at the mess hall. Ironically, as his grief mounted, he thought to himself that seeing Chekov on the bridge would cheer him up.

A female voice interrupted his thoughts and Kirk's stomach dropped.

"Mrs. Chekov?" he asked in a rather uncaptainly manner.

There was a pause. "Jes," she said in trepidation.

"This is . . ." He swallowed with difficulty, grateful that that he was alone and that she couldn't see him. "This is Captain Kirk of the Enterprise."

"Vhat's happened?"

He could already hear the mounting panic in her voice. Kirk opened his mouth to reply, but couldn't quite find his voice. How the hell was he supposed to tell a mother that her teenage son was dead?

"Vhat's happened to my Pasha?" she demanded. "Put him on ze comm, zis instant."

"I can't," Kirk said dumbly. "I'm so sorry."

"No." Her hysteria is evident even in the crackling transmission. "No! You cannot mean zat—zat he's—"

Kirk wished he could say that Chekov died quietly, that he hadn't felt a thing, that he'd been at peace when it happened—but he can't lie, not without hearing Chekov's screams, seeing the pooling blood, remembering his desperate plea of "don't let me die" like a ghost in his ear.

Instead he said, "He died saving another crew member. He's a hero."

"Not my Pasha," she cried. "He can't be dead, he promised he'd be safe—"

Kirk didn't understand the streams of broken Russian that escaped the woman after that, but he heard the pain scratching in her voice and felt his own tears dripping down his face, mourning the seventeen-year-old boy who had wanted nothing more than to make his mother proud.

* * *

Chekov had made it clear enough that he loved Sulu. The pilot and navigator shared a bathroom between their quarters, and more often than not they camped out in each other's rooms. Sulu had started to suspect after a few months of this that Chekov had feelings for him—Chekov had fallen asleep with Sulu's shirt clutched between his fingers, had cussed out the engineers who mocked Sulu's obsession with botany in three different languages, had called out for Sulu when they were all infected with a particularly hostile flu strain and only quieted when the pilot was near.

It was evident that Chekov had what Uhura had endearingly called a "crush" on Sulu. What Sulu had never had the guts to say to Chekov, though, was that he loved him too.

Sulu had always planned to tell him. Next week Chekov was supposed to turn eighteen, and Sulu had harbored some grand fantasy of admitting his true feelings to the ensign the eve of his birthday. They'd take it slow—Sulu had wanted to savor every moment with Chekov as if they were going to live forever. He'd wanted to run his fingers through Chekov's curls, to hold him in his arms after a nightmare, to feel his laughter against his chest when they were close.

He kept telling himself to wait. He kept telling himself that it was enough just to see the boy on the bridge, to work and live beside him, to carve a little piece of himself into Chekov's life.

Sulu stood in Chekov's quarters now and wished more than anything that he hadn't waited. It would have been wrong, but at least Chekov wouldn't have died thinking that Sulu didn't love him.

The pilot sank onto Chekov's bed. It was made immaculately. The whole room was orderly and clean, the way Chekov always kept it. The only evidence that a teenager had lived here were the dirty socks peeking out from under the closet, and suddenly Sulu was choking up again at the sight of them.

Kirk had asked him if he wanted to see the body. They'd cleaned Chekov up, dressed him, and stuck him in what was more or less a freezer to preserve him. The idea of it was so sterile and callous that Sulu had refused to look. He wanted to remember the Chekov whose eyes were lit up with excitement in anticipation of the away mission, not the Chekov whose eyes were unseeing and closed for all of eternity.

Scotty tried to comfort him by saying that Chekov had died a hero. Sulu would rather he lived a coward, because the idea of life without the boy is more than he can bear.

* * *

Ooookay, so now I can cross "murder an adorable ensign" off my to-do list for today.


End file.
